L2_Payne (2006), Social Divisions as a Sociological Perspectieve-Chapter15

This preview
has intentionally blurred sections.
Sign up to view the full version.

This preview
has intentionally blurred sections.
Sign up to view the full version.

This preview
has intentionally blurred sections.
Sign up to view the full version.

This preview
has intentionally blurred sections.
Sign up to view the full version.

This is the end of the preview.
Sign up
to access the rest of the document.

Unformatted text preview: This chapter wiEl provide you with a broad critical understanding of the
followng Issues in social division: E! The deﬁnition ofa sociai divismn is Social divzsions are sociain embedded forms of social inequality 5 Seeial difference, sociaE Inequality and somal dimsion i3: Although universal and persistent. social divasmns are not immutable
or ‘natoral' . a: Sociai divasion and socéai cohesion: overlapping memberships. cross»
cutting ties and seeial conformity The compiexity of multiple memberships and identities a: Social divmon and sociological theory: structurai-fonctionaiism.
Marxism and post—modernism E5 Are there only a few soc1al divisions or many? Alternative perspectives Hierarchy and inequaiity versus ‘others’ and personal identity anemia (MG)- jimm- DNWWJ “5 A fawn LGC‘IQQL PFiZ—fi’FC'ﬁvE r l‘N Vﬂ‘iiﬂEr (tips), jOClQL, Divalent-i} We have deiiberately written each of the chapters so far in a way that ‘deﬁnesi
social divisions indirectly by taliong about key examples. This approach Elves
a good feei of what social division is all about through an exploration of C8585
and details. An alternative approach wouEd have been to start with a formal
deﬁnition expressed as a set of abstract principies. A fall deﬁnition1 of course
needs both examples and a precise statement of principles This ﬁnal chain“
provides the other part of the deﬁnition and will also enabie us to reflect 0H
what social divisions in the plural might mean as a way of ‘seeing’ society-
While division can reSuit in two, three or more categories, these form an
interrelated whole that inciudes ali members of a society: paradoxicaliy the
distinction between the categories expresses the iogical connection between them-
These distinctions are marked by clear—cut -— rather than minimal — diﬁerences
in material circumstances or cuitural advantages (aithoogh "clear-cot’ and LlPWIL‘i‘lZE {ah/p l‘lfw lama: FQLOianu/ii Mch'uuav 347 348 SOCIAL DiVlSlONS as A SOCiOLOGlCAl PERSPECTIVE ‘rninirnal‘ are terms winch at the margin involve subjective iudgements).'1'h
differences between categories are maintatned by a normative order that
supports those who accept the division and constrains those who seek to alteti A deﬁnition of ‘social divisions” A "soCIal division] of the kind explored in the preceding chapters conforms t :
nine core charactertstics: o A socral division is a prtnCiple of socrai organisarton resulting tn a sometys
wide distinction between two or more logically interrelated categories of
people, which are somally sanctioned as substannally different from one
another in material and cultural ways. ' e Although not permanently established in a given form1 a social division tends
to be long—lastmg and is sustained by dominant cultural beliefs, the organis-
ation of social institutions and the situational interaction of individuals. e Membership of a category in a social divxsxon confers unequal opportun ties of access to dealrahie ‘resoarces’ of all kinds and therefore different life: chances and lifestyles from membership of other categorres. A socral divismn is socially constructed, in the sense that it is not a Simple manifestation of ‘naturai’ or ‘inevitable’ laws of exrstence, but this does not mean that tr can be ignored or revised by the moment—to—moment social
interactions1 interpretations, decrstons or socral acts of individuals. The extent of differentiation between categories varies from some] divrsion to social divrston, but movement across a divide is either rare or relatively slow to be achieved. a Being socially divided tends to produce shared soCIal identities for people in the same category, often expreSSed by reference to their perceived differ— ence from those in an alternative category of the same division. However much specific social divisrons are opposed by those disadvantaged by them, the principle of secret divisions is a universal systematic feature of human society. 9 Each soc1al division encompasses all members of soCIery in one or other of
its categories1 but individuals seldom have matching proﬁies of category
membership across the range of socraE diVisions. a An examination of life chances and lifestyles is an empirical method of
identifying social divisions and categories. This deﬁnition means that rather than concentrating on just one or two social divrsions, we need to include at least a dozen in our sociological perspective
(Payne 2004}. Geoff Payne 349 As we saw in Chapter 1. the idea of soCial divisron entails pom extenswe
differences and a continuity of exrsrence over time, which stems from its inte—
gration in the social order through values, institutions and daymby—day 1nterac~
tions. On the one hand, there is a sense, if not of permanence, then massive
inertia: at is not easy to challenge and change the boundaries. On the other
hand, all the contributors have shown how things have changed over time and
Stressed that soc1al divisions are not immutableThe key to understanding this
is the embedded nature of the social practices that sustain each division. It
follows that, while not "natarai’ laws, divisions are typically encountered as
constraining {particularly so for those tn the less advantaged categories} or
sustaining {more so for the advantaged). It might be tempting ~— and rndeed not unfair — to read this emphasis on
constraint. disadvantage and differential life chances as meaning that to some
extent each of the contributors perceives socml diviSion as inherently undesrr»
able. Some conunentators1 like Marsland and Saunders, have commented on
the general tendency of sociologiSts to side with the underdog, or indeed to be
ideologically biased. While at will be apparent from the style and content of
the chapters that the authors have varying degrees of personal commitment to
their topics, they are also all concerned with its socrologtcal analysrs.The fact
that the div1sions can reasonably be identiﬁed as seeial intust'tce, a potential
source of unhappiness and even Civil strife should lend purpose, rather than
bias, to the analysis. All seeial arrangements entail settlements that bring rela—
tive advantage: those who gain most from present circumstances are likely to
wish them to condone1 nor to have them challenged and to present the
current outcome as a consensus supported by all parties, rather than one that
yields advantages for some, to the disadvantage of others. One tests of soci—
ology is to question things that would otherwise be taken for granted, even if
there are those who would rather not have such questions raised. Because a social analyst is unhappy with the current patterns of a particular
social division does not automatically lead to bias or a Simplistic belief that all
social divrsions can somehow be removed. One may take comfort that this
div151on or that takes a different form in some society described by anthropol—
ogists or historians, but there is no evidence of societies - even the simplest
hunter-«gatherer societies w operating without divisions. However, the univer‘
sality of divasion is no justiﬁcation for the continuation of all divisrons in
exactly their current form, or of extremes of differentiation. Nonetheless, it is a feature of soCial divismns that they pers1sr. As has been
seen, one class system may gtve way to another, or the role of women may be
enhanced through emancrpation or entry into the workplace, but the core
division surv'ives. It may be possible to he sootally mobile between classes, for
cracks in the glass ceiling to be exploited or for us all to move through the life» 350 SOCIAL DiWSIONS AS A sooowch/u PERSPECTIVE - course, but these are opportunities for individuals who need to devote many years of their lives to achieving the transition from one category to the other or ' moving the boundaries. Divisions are not absolute or invariable, but they do a
pretty good tab of seeming so to be. In part, this appearance of substance comes from the nature of the crate gories. These are ‘opposttional’ both in the sense of opposing interests or" different categories (advantagedidisadvantaged}, but also in terms of deﬁning one category in terms of another, as its mirror image. Although it is
possible to make more of these notions of difference and comparison {for
example see Hetherington and Munro E997), there is little to be gained from
straying into the arcane world of much post—structuralism and post—
modernism. Contrary to any impression given by the often wordy elabora—
tions of such writings, the core issue is fairly straightforward. Identity :5 not
only shared with others, but expressed as not sharing or belonging with
others. The identiﬁcation of a more advantaged group, to which the disad—
vantaged do not belong and which is socially demarcated, makes the proba-
bility of change seem less likely. The characteristic lifestyles and life chances
that go with category membership and identity mark off the boundaries-
between them, helping the sociologist to locate social divisron but reinforcing
the maintenance of the differences. This methodological point also relates to the observation that individuals
hold dual (or multi») memberships in a range of annual divisions. As the Intro—
duction stressed, people take their identities from a mixture of categories and
therefore have some choice of identity. The ‘proﬁie of membership’ diﬁ'ers
from person to person, and is one of the reasons why simple explanations of social behaviour being ‘cansed’ by membership of a single category do not
work. All social life is not determined by somal cla55, whatever may have
seemed to be the case with sociological analysis in former times. Deﬁnitions as differentiation The advantage of formalising and elaborating a deﬁnition in this way is that it
provides a means of marking ed” a boundary between social divrsions and other
similar, but signiﬁcantly different, ideasThis is a source of potential confusion-3
as the lack of a clear distinction in some of the literature (for example Braham
and lanes 2002) shows. Not all separations of people into Opposing categories
are of a scale to merit inclusion as actual divisions. For example, the many
‘tages’ and ‘hells’ popular in contemporary media representations (‘road ragﬁ’:
‘trolley rage‘, ’neighbours from hell’, holidays from hell’ and so on) may involve
disagreements and conﬂicts, but they hardiy constitute a soCial division. They Geoff Payne 3 5 I certainly are not society—wide, not all—inclusive diVisions, not permanent, nor
socially sanctioned as ‘natural’.To be counted as a sociai division requires that
all the criteria should be in place.This latter requirement also helps to distin—
guish between the idea of a social division and other concepts such as soCiaE
inequality and social diﬁ'erentiation. ‘Social inequality’ is a condition of disproportionate access to ‘resources’,
that is, not just ﬁnancial resources but any human or cuitural resources. State-
ments about social inequalities tend to deal, at their most simple, with ‘facts’.
Thus one can talk about speciﬁc social inequalities in, say, housing, educa~
tional qualiﬁcations, risk of being a victim of crime or access to political inﬂu—
ence. It is certainly interestmg to learn that 7 per cent of the population own
84 per cent of the land in Scotiand, that l per cent of adults own over 40 per
cent of personal net capital in England and Wales, or that the worst off one—
ﬁfth of our society have incomes lower than half the national average. But
what is ‘interesting’ lies in discovering why and how such patterns of
inequality come about, are maintained and what the consequences are for
those experiencing them. ?attcrns of inequality may result from social divisions or be the Visible
markers of divisions. They are closely associated with divisions. However,
as Roberts (2001: 4) has suggested, social divxsron is an all-embracmg
term: even when it is used to refer only to class, gender and ethnicity, it
does not presuppose a simple hierarchy or set of soCial strata, and places
the interaction of the diviSions at the centre of research and debate. The
idea of social divisions brings greater meaning and structure to the simple
patterns of differences. It attempts to include the way in which some core
features cover the whole population, contributing to their various senses of
identity and woricing as an interrelated set, Without prioritismg one divi-
sion above all othersTlie discussion of health (Chapter 14) illustrates this
point very clearly. ‘Social diﬁerentiation’, on the other hand, is a more Speciﬁc term often
used to deal with a itey diﬁerence between ’nmple’ tribal or agrarian soc1eties
and more complex, industrial and contemporary societies. In the iatter soc1»
eties, with their more complex social diiriSion of labour, the greater specialisa-
tion and range of tasits, in particular around production and occupations.
demarcates peOple from each other and groups from other groups. This
formulation, drawing on Durkheim‘s concerns with socxal cohesion and his
ideas of mechanical and organic solidarity, was particularly attractive among
those sociologists who were attempting to deal with evident and extensive
social inequalities without recourse to class analysis, for example in a US context where ‘class’ carried the politicaily charged summation of Marxism
and anti—American ways. 353 SOClAL DlVlSlONS AS A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Social divisions and social cohesion The account of social life presented in this volume is characterised on the one
hand by division, disadvantage, hierarchy, inequality and resistance, and on the
other by group or category identity as the basic unit1 shaped by a sense of diﬁ'er«
once from others. The question this poses, and which was noted in passing in
the Introduction, is that if social life is so fragmented, does it make much sense
to think in terms of such a vast conglomerauon as ‘society’, or even the extensive
divrsmns like class, gender or ethnicity that create the categories on which iden~
nry is based. preople lead their lives in terms of divisions and categories, each
remarltably diﬁerent from the next, how is collective life possible (Crow 2002)?
Why does everything not ﬂy apart and collapse in chaos? On the whole, despite
divisions, things do hold together (as the discussion of community in Chapter
13 showed).The Simple answer to understanding this lies in seeing how soCial
divisions interconnect and institutional processes constrain. In the ﬁrst place, while human behaviour is not totally constrained by
structures of relationships and normative assumptions, individuals conduct
their unique lives within frameworks of accepted actions. Social divisions are
‘sustained by dominant cultural beliefs‘, so that they are carried in our heads
Social diwsions also operate through complex, powerful and extensive institu—
tions, that is, through systems of ways of acting in recognised1 appropriate
ways backed by positive and negative social sanctions. Our capacity to modify this through situational interactions is constrained .'
not just by what 15 in our heads, or the promise/threat of sanctions, but the willingness of others to engage on their part in that modiﬁcation. If they are members of the same category, they are also part of a constraining system that:_
encourages group identification and solidarity, not non-conformity. If they are -.
members of a more advantaged opposrnonal category, they have a vested-'3
interest to preventing the individual from modifying relationships that give .
them advantages. The scope for adapting meanings and beliefs, innovatory =
action and creating change is limited by the willingness of other acrors to3 tolerate and support non—conforming behaviour.
In that senso, soCial structuration is essentially a social process and one tha never starts Wltl'l a clean sheet of uncommitted other actors. The normative
order that Is inherited and recreated is certainly not monolithic or uniform, 3
but its component elements and segments are indeed powerful. it is usually;
easier to go on doing the same thing, eaSIer not to ‘rock the boat’; acceptance- of one’s lot in a given category is usually the easiest solution. _
This does not provide a complete answer, horvever, because if people are al in fragmented categories1 now do the cultural/instironooal/interactional_- processes hold the disparate categories together? Socrai cohesmn is more Geoff Payne 3 5 3 common than social disorder or disintegration and, indeed, lower level
conﬂicts of interest are largely kept within bounds, mainly because individuals
have multiple memberships of categories. It follows that unless memberships
{or boundary lines} coincide, social leESlOIlS do not reinforce one another. For
instance, being working class may oﬁ'er one source of identity and motivation
for action, but the members of the worldng class are also variously black or
white, male or female, ﬁt or ill, old or young. These other identities fragment
the class identity and in turn are fragmented by class and all the others. It is also the case that divisrons are not equally ‘socially visible’, They may
be embodied to varying degrees in physrcal diﬁ'erences (age, ethnicity, gender
or disability}.They may manifest themselves in more or less dramatic forms: a
dichotomy is likely to be more obvrous than a division into a mulitplicity of
categories. Small minorities may be excluded from public consciousness by
media selectivity or physical isolation (Payne 2004). These differences feed
back into our senses of identity. lfwe think of the 13 main divisions in this book (Chapters 2—44), and treat
each of them as consisting of a dichotomy, that alone would offer 26 categories
to which individuals could belong. Those categories can logically be combined.
in the sense of a proﬁle that an individual might manifest as a result of her or
his 13 memberships, in over 8,000 different possible proﬁles. Of course, some
proﬁles may be unlikely: to a considerable extent, disadvantage on one division
tends to be associated with disadvantage on others, as Anthias (£998: 531)
argues with reference to gender, ethnicny and class. However, this is numeri—
cally balanced by the fact that most of the SOClEll divisions exist with more than
two categories in each (see for example the number of classes in Chapter 2). Complex mulnple memberships blur differences in two ways. First, their
complexity intervenes to reduce the chances of a "Single issue3 identity or cause
for action emerging. Even when individuals consciously deﬁne themselves in
speciﬁc terms w feminist, black, class warrior, grey panther — their own other
memberships still have a part to play. The same is true of those who attempt a
dual identity, for example black feminist. The multiplicity of memberships of
people in a group mitigates against them all ‘movmg in the same direction" at
once; whatever the individual may intend, the views of others have to be taken
into account and their membership-based agendas contribute to a confusion of
perspectives. Complex proﬁles disgmse the underlying divisions. Multiple memberships bring together individuals in one social context who
are disparate in other contexts. Employees may deﬁne themselves in class
terms, but share national identity with their employers. Conversely, they may
use gender or ethniCity as grounds for not acting in class terms1 by seeking to
exclude or discriminate against women or the minority ethnic groups despite
their shared membership of the working class. Employers and managers are 354 SOCIAL DlWSlONS As A SOCIOLOGlCAL PERSPECTIVE then able to exploit such differences for their own ends. Only when social divi—
srons coincide are major ‘fault lines’ in society likely to develop. These ‘overiappmg ties’ were sharply demonstrated in Gluckman’s (I960)
classic account of feuding between clans among the Nuer and other African
peoples. Drawing on several anthropological studi...
View
Full Document

What students are saying

As a current student on this bumpy collegiate pathway, I stumbled upon Course Hero, where I can find study resources for nearly all my courses, get online help from tutors 24/7, and even share my old projects, papers, and lecture notes with other students.

Kiran
Temple University Fox School of Business ‘17, Course Hero Intern

I cannot even describe how much Course Hero helped me this summer. It’s truly become something I can always rely on and help me. In the end, I was not only able to survive summer classes, but I was able to thrive thanks to Course Hero.

Dana
University of Pennsylvania ‘17, Course Hero Intern

The ability to access any university’s resources through Course Hero proved invaluable in my case. I was behind on Tulane coursework and actually used UCLA’s materials to help me move forward and get everything together on time.